The problem when I come to write in a public place – like here, in the restaurant on the rooftop of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is that as soon as I open my laptop to type, a large portion of the English language floats lazily out of my head, along with my impetus to…
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“Oh! You’re from Jupiter too.”I blinked at the hairy stranger. “Erm…am I?”“Yeah I can tell. I can just tell.”The hairy stranger pointed his finger across the pub table and, after a moment of hesitation, I touched the brandished finger briefly with the end of mine. I must have passed this test of Jupiter etiquette because…
Read MoreSomething weird just happened to me. Without moving my head at all, I could flick my eyes to the left and see Eastbourne, the place in England where I live and spend most of my time, and I could flick them to the right and see the northern coast of France, the country I’m currently…
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Fowey is not pronounced Fow-ee. That’s the most surprising thing about this small Cornish fishing town. Everything else is exactly as it should be. Steep narrow streets, quaint cafes offering Cornish cream teas, crooked 16th century pubs, seagulls, little shops (selling postcards, chunky jewellery, floaty dresses and those tiny wooden sailing ships you’re supposed to…
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To the disappointment of every tabloid journalist in the UK, the late May bank holiday was not a ‘total washout’ as predicted. These are from today’s walk around Lullington Heath 🙂
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If Herceg Novi were a person, and not a small town located at the mouth of Montenegro’s famous fjord-like Bay of Kotor, it would be a person with multiple battle wounds – perhaps a missing limb or two, definitely with severe PTSD, and a lot of stories to tell. Over the last few centuries Herceg…
Read MoreGatwick Express, Gatwick Express You’ve got plugs, free WiFi, Foreign announcements no less. Your windows are shiny and your carpets are clean Even the WC’s had a spritz of Mr. Sheen. I’ve been travelling for nine hours And I’m going mad. But I have to say that standard class ain’t bad. There’s just one small…
Read MoreI wasn’t ready for uni to end. It went by in a happy, hedonistic flash and before I knew it I was trussed up in one of those standard ‘office girl’ shift dresses staring at a computer screen churning out generic website content about things like coronary heart disease and diabetes which – let’s face…
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I recently got back from a brilliant week’s holiday in Massachusetts. My friend had her wedding just outside a little town called Groton by a big, quiet lake surrounded by forest. It was beautiful, all of it. The wedding, the lake, the white wood-clad New England houses with their dolls-house dormer windows and immaculately striped…
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Last week I spent five and a half days in the rural Languedoc Roussillon region of France at the house my grandparents have spent 27 summers restoring from a ruin.
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